This Story Is Happy End

I really don’t like endings. I don’t like it when a book ends, or a TV shows hits a season finale, or I have to say good-bye to a longtime friend. Little endings, like the end of an episode or a chapter, are fine, but I don’t like that sense of finality when something is well and truly over. Maybe that’s why I don’t like movies, since they end in only two hours, which is a pretty low entertainment-to-time ratio. But the longer something goes, the more trouble I have accepting that the characters are done, the plot is resolved, and there’s nothing else to be said.

So it’s with mixed emotions that I come up to the end of The Great Tower of Oldechi. I started it in March 2009 and its last session (session #108, which tells you about how often we met) is this weekend. The campaign started at Level 1 and ended at Level 30, so we’ve gotten to see many of the characters grow and grow apart over the last few years. It’s hard to think that I won’t be working on this campaign or designing with these players in mind any more, since it’s been a weekly ritual for so long.

My favorite endings are the ones that aren’t, the ones that include the possibility of new adventure even if it’s beyond the scape of the work. 4th Edition doesn’t have that. Once a player hits Level 31, there’s nothing left and the character is unplayable. Many even disappear into space, aligning themselves at the right hands of gods or fight great wars far beyond mortal eyes, just to make sure players don’t get antsy and try to play their characters too long. It’s a hard limit on power level, and it’s also a hard limit on the life of a character. That’s one of the reasons this is so hard, in that there’s no chance at all of the characters continuing. They’re changed permanently and irrevocably, and anything that severe has a strong sense of tragedy.

There’s also my fear that the ending won’t live up to the work, a problem that grow larger the longer a work goes. If it’s hard to end a book, imagine how hard it it to end a seven-book series, or a comic series that’s been running for fifteen years, or a video game where players have invested hundreds of hours. I’ve never been in (or heard of) a D&D campaign longer than this in time and level scope, and I have to imagine that there’s an expectation for the end beyond “The boss is dead! Pray for a true peace in space!“.

I’m not sure whether a lousy ending is better than no ending. The whole “no ending” idea never really occurred to me for a campaign, because I like my campaigns to have a myth arc. When I start a campaign, I have some idea of what the central conflict will be, even if I don’t know how it’s going to end (or, sometimes, start), and significant plots should end if there’s going to be a satisfying story. So I don’t expect that I’ll ever start a campaign expecting that it will only end when everybody gets tired of it. I’d rather do things with bangs than whimpers.

I know that what matters for an ending isn’t how I feel about it, but how the players feel. The problem is that I’m not sure how the players will react to the ending I have in mind (or anything, at all, ever), whether they’ll think it’s a satisfying conclusion or if it doesn’t make any sense or justify the campaign as a whole. Because justification is kind of the point of an ending: all plots should have a conflict, and all conflicts should have a resolution unless the lack of the resolution is a significant and inalienable part of the plot, like the horror franchises where the villain’s never really dead. If the players, viewers, or readers expect things to be resolved, they’re deeply unsatisfied with lingering questions. They want something that justifies all the time they’ve put into following a work, and an ending that doesn’t give them what they want can lead to them souring on the whole thing.

So it’s with some consternation that I work on the session for my least favorite part a campaign, a session that can play a big part in whether this campaign is a success or a failure. As I am wont to do, I’m already working on the next campaign and the one after that, so even if it’s miserable I hopefully won’t dwell on it too long.

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I’m not good at ending blog posts either.